A Letter to Tom Wolfe

The Kingdom of Speech
by Tom Wolfe
Jonathan Cape, 2016, 185 pages, $32.99
__________________________

Dear Tom (if I may),
Having just finished your Kingdom of Speech I felt I had to write to you because of the interesting parallels with my own area of study. And oddly, your story even begins with Thomas Malthus, as does mine, although in my case with his less well-known Principles of Political Economy.

But let me begin with your own newly published book. It was from Malthus that Alfred Russel Wallace received the stimulus that led him to the theory of evolution by natural selection. I had vaguely known the story, but I can see why the actual circumstances are seldom drawn out. A “flycatcher” out in the South Pacific, recovering from malaria, Wallace was inspired by his reading of Malthus to recognise that those survive who are the ones best suited to the actual conditions of the world, that here was a mechanism through which evolution might proceed. But being in the middle of nowhere he had no one to share his manuscript with so he sent it to Darwin, a man he barely knew, who showed it to Charles Lyell, the leading scientist of his time, to whom Darwin said this had been his own idea which he had not bothered ever to mention, and indeed, had never bothered to write down. So Lyell took Wallace’s paper, and a Darwinian “abstract” not even written by Darwin, to the next meeting of the Royal Society, all without Wallace’s consent.

What a wretched story! With Darwin and Lyell gentlemen, and Wallace a nobody making his living collecting biological specimens to send back to England (hence the occupational title, “flycatcher”), he was in no position to dispute the account when he finally returned to England. Oddly it seems to me, Darwin even said that he, too, had been inspired by reading Malthus’s On Population.

Which is where the parallel with the story I wish to tell begins. It was from that same Malthus that Keynes was led to deficient aggregate demand as the cause of recessions. And while Keynes has been able to hide his debt to Malthus, Darwin could not, in part because Wallace’s letter had been shared with Lyell, and partly because Wallace was alive and would not have kept quiet had Darwin pretended it had all been his own idea. But also, perhaps, in part because Darwin could not hide the truth from his own conscience.

In your book, you avoid actually stating as baldly as you might that Darwin took the idea from Wallace, and perhaps to reach that conclusion goes too far for the evidence to permit. I, however, have no compunction in stating that Keynes took the idea of deficient demand from Malthus. The evidence that Keynes snatched this idea without any attribution is as clear as circumstantial evidence can ever allow, although it has been denied every time it has been brought up, especially since I am the only person who ever brings it up. This is partly because it would show Keynes was less original than he pretended he was, but more importantly, because Keynes did everything he could to deny there had been any outside influences on him (other than his colleague R.F. Kahn). The fact is, such a connection cannot be admitted as even possibly true, since Keynes specifically states in The General Theory that he had only realised others had had the same idea after he had come to these conclusions himself.

The dating from the archives makes it abundantly evident that Keynes discovered the entire notion of demand deficiency in October 1932 by reading Malthus’s letters to Ricardo. Every study of the transition between Keynes’s 1930 Treatise on Money and his 1936 General Theory recognises that Keynes took a decisive and unmistakable step in a new direction sometime towards the end of 1932. Until then, Keynes had focused on the role of money in causing recession. Then, really out of nowhere, unless you understand why, Keynes switched direction and began to argue that economies in recession are suffering from too little demand due to too much saving. These were the same conclusions that had been put forward more than a hundred years before by Malthus, and it just so happens that it was at the end of 1932 that Keynes had, for the first time, begun to look at Malthus’s economic arguments.

Like Wallace with Darwin, it is Malthus whose originality is denied by Keynes. But unlike Wallace, Malthus was in no position to complain, being by then a hundred years dead. Keynes took up the argument himself with no acknowledgment of any debt other than to say that Malthus had once said something similar a long time before, but he had not known of this similarity until he had reached the same conclusions himself.

The second area of your book I found fascinating is that Darwin was unable to deal with the problems in the theory of natural selection that were evident to Wallace. You list three:

natural selection can expand a creature’s powers only to the point where it has an advantage over the competition in the struggle for existence—and no further …

natural selection can’t produce any changes that are bad for the creature …

natural selection can’t produce any “specially developed organ” that is useless to a creature … or of so little use that it is not until thousands and thousands of years down the line that the creature can take advantage of the organ’s full power.

The parallel with my own criticisms of Keynes is that one would expect that an economic theory would have to conform, at least in part, with the way an economy worked.

• There would have to have been some instance when an economy went into recession because there had been a sudden fall-off in demand for no reason at all, other than that people had increased their level of saving just out of the blue.

• There would have to have been at least a single instance when an economy that had gone into recession was brought to recovery by an increase in public spending. Just one would be sufficient.

• There would have to have been no counter instance where a large cut in public spending brought on recovery, another outcome completely contrary to the theory.

Keynesian macro fails on all three counts.

The third area where I found the story you told parallel to my own is where you deal with Noam Chomsky and his eventual undoing by Dan Everett. You describe the problems Darwin faced in explaining the origins of human speech. Right from the start, this had been an issue that the theory of natural selection could not account for and which Darwin had been roundly criticised for ignoring. You write of Max Müller, who had been an immediate critic of Darwin’s theory, with his focus on our human ability to speak. Müller wrote (which you quote on page 54):

The Science of Language will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of evolutionists and to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute.

The “Just So” stories told by Darwin in his 1871 Descent of Man convinced no one and the entire issue was dropped for the next eighty years. It is here that Noam Chomsky enters the scene, the linguistics equivalent of Keynes, bringing forward a new theory to account for language. It is also here where I see myself paralleling the efforts of Dan Everett in opposing Chomsky, just as I have been working to rid us of this pestilent Keynesian theory.

Chomsky parallels Keynes in coming up with a theory of speech that made him appear the Einstein of his area of study, and then using his prominence to become one of the major anti-market writers of our time. Keynes required no transfer from some distant theory to become the anti-market influence he is, writing a book on economic theory under the pretence of saving capitalism from itself. Keynes even titled his book in conscious imitation of Einstein’s “General Theory” of Relativity.

In its own way I see parallels with myself in both Wallace and Everett. I have always understood that the resistance to what I have written stems in no small part from my lack of academic status. I began my work not only outside of any of the major economic institutions, but even outside of the university system itself. I discovered the problems with Keynesian economics while working as chief economist for Australia’s largest business association, which was, I suppose, my own version of field work, which virtually no professional economist now does.

Economics is now, like linguistics, a theoretical structure entirely dominated by datasets, statistics and equations. I work in the history of economics, where maths and stats seldom intrude. I am now at a minor university on the fringes of the known world, teaching as I do in Melbourne, Australia. It’s not quite the Amazon jungle, but for these sorts of things it could not be more remote.

Chomsky argued that a “language organ” had evolved which had led to an innate natural grammar that each human was born possessing. And what “iced it for him” in giving him the reputation he now has was a book review he wrote, attacking behaviourism in general and B.F. Skinner in particular, where the issue was whether speech was simply a learned response from one’s surroundings. Chomsky’s polemical powers—like Keynes’s—drove this rival approach completely out of academic respectability. Or at least he did until the publication of Everett’s work, whose personal life story, as you relate it in the book, is incredible. But what mattered so far as the history of ideas goes was Everett’s 2005 paper which took on Chomsky’s theories head on, based on years of work in the field, mastering a language spoken by the 250 to 500 Pirahã people who live deep in the Amazon basin. About this, you wrote:

It was the Pirahã’s own distinctive culture, their unique ways of living, that shaped the language—not any “language organ,” not any “universal grammar” or “deep structure” or “language acquisition device” that Chomsky said all languages had in common.

If this is so, then Chomsky is wrong. I found it particularly appealing that the Pirahã language included various birdcalls so that they could speak to each other while hunting without scaring away the game—a convincing example of language being a local invention suited to the needs of a people rather than some universal welling up from deep within the brain.

The parallel for me is my efforts, along the same lines as Everett, in getting others to see how plainly wrong Keynesian economics is. I have written endlessly on it since the 1980s. In pursuit of this agenda, I have written articles, published in journals, and authored and edited a series of books. The fact is that no one will pay serious attention to any of this even though there is more than a reasonable chance I am right and modern economic theory is dangerously wrong.

And I do agree with you that the effect of Darwin on Western civilisation has been devastating. I was astonished to learn that Thomas Huxley—“Darwin’s Bulldog”—never accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, but pursued it only because it helped him spread his own atheistic beliefs. Nietzsche’s prognostications (which you discuss) that our civilisation would become unbound through its lack of a spiritual order, because of Darwinian theory, have been more than borne out. That Keynes has merely undermined our economic order may be of a lesser magnitude but not without its massive consequences for the West.

I draw all this to your attention on the off chance you are looking for something else to write about following your deconstruction of Darwin and Darwinian theory. My wish would therefore be that you might now turn your attention to Keynes, whose own deconstruction at the hands of a master such as yourself is long overdue.

In the meantime, I hope there are many who find their way to The Kingdom of Speech, which is an amazing read on so many levels, not least of which is the way it reveals how ideas are formed and then sustained across time. Also, as usual, it was as readable as anything written today.

With kindest best wishes,
Steve.